Mid-market fintech is in a fundraising rut. How PR can help unstick it.
Author: Sam Barber, Founder of Pitchr.ai
Fintechs with $50-100 million in ARR are caught in fundraising no man's land. The fintech PR fix is less about you and more of a well crafted story about your category.
The fintech funding squeeze
At Fiat Ventures’ Fintech Summit, FT Partners CEO Steve McLaughlin laid it out: mid-market fintech is the hardest place to be right now.
These companies are too mature to be sold as a moonshot but haven't made the leap into hyperscale territory. Investors are sitting on their hands. Crunchbase data shows global fintech funding rose 5% in Q1 2026 but flowed through 31.5% fewer deals than a year earlier. Bigger checks, fewer companies.
What McLaughlin told founders
Three things stood out from his conversation with Fiat Ventures' Rohit Ramkumar.
Be open about valuation. Founders trying to be cagey are not helping themselves in this market. Say the number.
Be realistic. If the price isn't drawing interest, the price is wrong. Adjust or sit it out.
Stay visible. VCs can't fund what they don't know or see. If your name isn't surfacing in the conversations that matter, you're invisible by default.
The Pitchr take: sell the category, not the company
If your individual story isn't moving investors (or even getting you in the door), change the unit of analysis. Get them excited about the space you're in and your rise in it.
Banking technology is a useful example. For decades, a handful of legacy providers locked up the core systems running banks. Breaking in was close to impossible.
That might be cracking. AI and agentic tools, combined with the rise of de novo banks, have produced a growing group of companies building brand-new operating systems for banks. The category itself is suddenly interesting again.
If you're in that category, your job is to make the category louder and, frankly, sexier.
Lean into your competitors and the market
This feels wrong. The instinct is to differentiate, attack, draw lines.
In a frozen market, the smarter play is the opposite. A category with multiple credible players signals a real market with real demand. A category of one is a unicorn…or a graveyard.
Cite the technology shifts driving your space and specifically AI’s impact or potential here. Point at the legacy entrenchment you and your competitors are also chipping away at. Reference peers in earned media without flinching. Finally, quantify the growth and size of the market through third-party research and analysis, and importantly, surface that data at every opportunity.
The rising tide argument only works if there's visibly more than one boat and you’re showing it's a mighty big ocean too.
The takeaway
Visibility plus category narrative beats company-only storytelling in a market that's stale and lost interest.
If you're a mid-market fintech founder waiting for the room to warm up, ask yourself: when an investor describes your category to a colleague this week, are you part of the description?
